Find posts by user idea

Talliesin

Now, it's quite likely that those more familiar with the workings of vBulletin will shoot this one down immediately, but here goes:

"Find posts by user" is both popular and useful (in particular when deleting Spam it's handy to check all the results and delete them as a batch).

It also sucks, performance-wise, due to how it works.

Would it be possible to create a find-posts-by-user which is entirely separate from the old search and uses a more efficient query?

Now maybe the query already used here is already quite efficient, and granted the most efficient possible isn't uber-fast - what with it having the check the searcher's access, but still, thought I might as well bring up the idea on the off chance it hasn't already been considered.

Sleepy

Perhaps it could just skip the access-check and only search publicly viewable forums? Might simplify things for the meantime?

scojones

Not a bad idea, I'm kind of lost without it tbh. I can only see it being inefficient when a user has alot of posts. For the average spambot there is only a handful of posts so in theory it shouldn't put too much strain on the servers. Also, if only moderators and above could do this I think it might be ok?

Talliesin

Well, for dealing with Spammers we could live with it only retrieving one page of results, and we could indeed limit it to public forums.

Deleted posts are important to view when making a site-ban decision (i.e. they've only one post and it's just a bit dodgy, but then you see that they've made 3 exactly identical posts that moderators have deleted and you site-ban them).

So looking at the search purely in it's muppet-checking capacity maybe letting s-mods see all deleted posts and moderators see none (even in their own forum) would be a way to balance functionality vs. performance.

All of this though is based on a very loose idea of how the data is structured.

Maybe such a separate search could be made nicely efficient for all. Maybe it couldn't be made efficient enough for anyone.

stevenmu

It could also skip the check to see if you've already read that post or not (I think the old one did that anyway). Also maybe give less details, the current query seems to return the full post text so for a search of someone with a few thousand posts there's a fair bit of reading and memory usage involved.

Cloud

I thought that something that searched using static HTML files from the archive would work nicely, if you prefix usernames with something like User: ... Any ideas?

Steveire

Cloud wrote:

I thought that something that searched using static HTML files from the archive would work nicely, if you prefix usernames with something like User: ... Any ideas?

Would that mean reading hundreds of pages from the archives each time someone searches? Or would you fill a simpler database using those pages and read that for search? I can see it working, but wouldn't it just have the same effect on the server?